Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Read online

  CHAPTER 2

  Building a Body

  WHAT I REMEMBER MOST about my last year of Hauptschule was the duck-and-cover drills. In the event of nuclear war, sirens would sound. We were supposed to close our books and hide under our desks with our heads between our knees and our eyes squeezed shut. Even a kid could figure out how pathetic that was.

  That June of 1961, we’d all been glued to the TV watching the Vienna summit between the new US president, John F. Kennedy, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Very few families had a television at home, but we all knew an electrical shop in the Lendplatz in Graz that had two TVs in the window. We ran down and stood on the sidewalk watching news reports on the meetings. Kennedy hadn’t even been in office six months, and most experts thought that it was a big mistake to go up so soon against Khrushchev, who was blunt and articulate and wily as hell. We kids had no opinion about that, and since the TV was inside, we couldn’t hear the sound anyway. But we watched! We were part of the action.

  We were living in a frightening situation. Every time Russia and America argued about anything, we felt we were doomed. We thought that Khrushchev would do something terrible to Austria because we were right in the middle; that’s why they had the summit in Vienna in the first place. The meeting didn’t go well. At one point, after making a hostile demand, Khrushchev said, “It’s up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace,” and Kennedy answered ominously, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.” When Khrushchev put up the wall in Berlin that fall, you heard adults telling one another, “This is it.” The gendarmerie was then the closest thing Austria had to an army, and my father had to go to the border with his military uniform and all his gear. He was away a week until the crisis cooled down.

  —

  In the meantime, we had lots of tension, lots of drills. My class of thirty or so adolescent boys was full of testosterone, but nobody wanted a war. Our interest was more in girls. They were a mystery, especially for kids like me who did not have sisters, and the only time we got to see them at school was in the courtyard before class because they were taught in their own wing of the building. These were the same girls we’d grown up with all our lives, but suddenly they seemed like aliens. How do you talk to them? We’d just reached the point where we were feeling sexual attraction, but it came out in odd ways—like the morning we ambushed them with snowballs in the yard before school.

  Our first class of the day was math. Instead of opening the textbook, the teacher said, “I saw you guys out there. We better talk about this.”

  We worried we were in for it—this was the same guy who had broken my friend’s front teeth. But today he was on a nonviolent track. “You guys want those girls to like you, right?” A few of us nodded our heads. “It is natural that you want that because we love the opposite sex. Eventually you want to kiss them, you want to hug them, and you want to make love to them. Isn’t that what everyone wants to do here?”

  More people nodded. “So don’t tell me it makes sense to throw a snowball into a girl’s face! Is that the way you express your love? Is that the way you say ‘I really like you’? Where did you figure that out?”

  Now he really had our attention. “Because when I think about the first move I made with girls,” he continued, “I gave them compliments and kissed them, and I held them and made them feel good, that’s what I did.”

  A lot of our fathers had never had this conversation with us. We realized that if you wanted a girl, you had to make an effort to have a conversation, not just drool like a horny dog. You had to establish a comfort level. I’d been one of the guys throwing snowballs. And I took these tips and carefully stored them away.

  During the very last week of class, I had a revelation about my future. It came to me during an essay-writing assignment, of all things. The history teacher always liked to pick four or five kids and pass out pages of the newspaper and make us write reports discussing whatever article or photo interested us. This time, as it happened, I was picked, and he handed me the sports page. On it was a photo of Mr. Austria, Kurt Marnul, setting a record in the bench press: 190 kilograms.

  I felt inspired by the guy’s achievement. But what really struck me was that he was wearing glasses. They were distinctive; a little tinted. I associated glasses with intellectuals: teachers and priests. Yet here was Kurt Marnul lying on the bench with his tank-top shirt and tiny waist, an enormous chest, and this huge weight above his chest—and he had on glasses. I kept staring at the picture. How could someone who looked like a professor from the neck up be bench-pressing 190 kilos? That’s what I wrote in my essay. I read it out loud and was pleased when I got a good laugh. But I came away fascinated that a man could be both smart and powerful.

  Along with my new interest in girls, I was more conscious of my body. I was beginning to pay close attention to sports: looking at athletes, how they worked out, how they used their bodies. A year before, it meant nothing; now it meant everything.

  As soon as school ended, my friends and I all made a beeline for the Thalersee. That was our big summer hangout; we’d swim and have mud fights and kick soccer balls around. I quickly started making friends among the boxers, wrestlers, and other athletes. The previous summer, I’d gotten to know one of the lifeguards, Willi Richter, who was in his twenties. He let me be his sidekick and help with his work. Willi was a good all-around athlete. When he wasn’t on duty, I’d tag along as he worked out. He had this whole routine of using the park as his gym, doing chin-ups on the trees, push-ups and squats in the dirt, running up the trails, and doing standing jumps. Once in a while he’d hit a bicep pose for me, and it would look great.

  Willi was friends with a pair of brothers who were really well developed. One was in university and one was a little younger. They were lifters, bodybuilders, and the day I met them, they were practicing shot put. They asked if I wanted to try, and started teaching me the turns and steps. Then we went up to that tree where Willi was doing chin-ups again. All of a sudden he said, “Why don’t you try?” I barely could hold on because the branch was thick and you had to have really strong fingers. I managed one or two reps, and then I slipped off. Willi said, “You know, if you practice this the whole summer, I guarantee you will be able to do ten, which would be quite an accomplishment. And I bet your lats would grow a centimeter on each side.” By lats, he meant the back muscles just below the shoulder blades, the latissimi dorsi.

  I thought, “Wow, that’s interesting, just from that one exercise.” And then we followed him up the hill through the rest of his routine. From then on, I did the exercises with him every day.

  The summer before, Willi had taken me to the World Weight Lifting Championship in Vienna. We rode up in a car with a bunch of guys, a four-hour drive. The trip took longer than we thought, so we only we got there for the last event, which was the super-heavyweight lifters. The winner was an enormous Russian named Yuri Vlasov. There were thousands of people in the auditorium yelling and screaming after he pressed 190.5 kilos, or 420 pounds, over his head. The weight lifting was followed by a bodybuilding contest, Mr. World, and this was my first time seeing guys oiled up and pumped and posing, showing off their physiques. Afterward we got to go backstage and see Vlasov in person. I don’t know how we got in—maybe someone had a connection through the weight lifting club in Graz.

  It was an adventure, and I had a great time, but at age thirteen, I didn’t think any of it had to do with me. A year later, though, everything was starting to register, and I realized I wanted to be strong and muscular. I’d just seen the movie Hercules and the Captive Women, which I’d loved. I was so impressed with the star’s body. “You know who that actor is, don’t you?” Willi said. “That’s Mr. Universe, Reg Park.” I told Willi about my essay in school. It turned out that he had actually been present when Kurt Marnul set the record in the bench press. “He’s a friend of mine,” Willi said.

  A couple of days later, Willi announced, “Tonigh
t Kurt Marnul is coming to the lake. You know, the guy that you saw in the picture?”

  “Great!” I said. So I waited around with one of my classmates. We were swimming and having our usual mud fights when finally Marnul showed up with a beautiful girl.

  He wore a tight T-shirt and dark slacks and those same tinted glasses. After changing clothes in the lifeguard’s shack, he came out in this tiny bathing suit. We were all flipping out. How unbelievable he looked! He was known for having gigantic deltoid and trapezius muscles, and sure enough, his shoulders were huge. And he had the small waist, the ridged abdominal muscles—the whole look.

  Then the girl who was with him put on her bathing suit—a bikini—and she also looked stunning. We said hello and then just kind of hovered, watching while they swam.

  Now I was definitely inspired. Marnul came to the lake all the time, it turned out, often with the most fantastic girls. He was nice to me and my friend Karl Gerstl because he knew he was our idol. Karl was a blond kid about my size and a couple of years older whom I’d introduced myself to one day after noticing that he had built up some muscle. “Do you work out?” I asked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I started with chin-ups and a hundred sit-ups a day, but I don’t know what else to do.” So I’d invited him to work out every day with Willi and me. Marnul would give us exercises.

  Soon a few more men joined: friends of Willi’s and guys from the gym where Kurt worked out, all of them older than me. The oldest was a heavyset guy in his forties named Mui. He had been a professional wrestler in his heyday; now he just worked out with weights. Like Marnul, Mui was a bachelor. He lived on a government stipend and was a professional student at the university; a cool guy, very political and smart, who spoke fluent English. He played an essential role in our group because he translated the English and American muscle magazines as well as Playboy.

  We always had girls around—girls who wanted to work out with us or just fool around. Europe was always far less puritanical than the United States. Dealing with the body was much more open—less hiding, less weirdness. It wasn’t unusual to see nude sunbathers in private areas of the lake. My friends would vacation at nudist colonies in Yugoslavia and France. It made them feel free. And with its hillsides, bushes, and trails, the Thalersee was a perfect playground for lovers. When I was ten or eleven, selling ice cream around the lake, I didn’t quite get why everyone was lying around on big blankets in the bushes, but by now I’d figured it out. Our group fantasy that summer was that we were living like gladiators. We were rolling back time, drinking pure water and red wine, eating meat, having women, running through the forest working out, and doing sports. Each week we’d build a big fire by the lake and make shish kebabs with tomatoes and onions and meat. We’d lie under the stars and turn the skewers in the flames until the food was just perfect.

  The man who bought the meat for these feasts was Karl’s father, Fredi Gerstl. He was the only real brain in the bunch, a solidly built guy with thick glasses who seemed more like a friend than a dad. Fredi was a politician, and he and his wife ran the two biggest tobacco and magazine kiosks in Graz. He was head of the tobacco sellers’ association, but his main interest was helping young people. On Sundays he and his wife would put their boxer on a leash and walk around the lake, with Karl and me tagging along. You never knew what Fredi was going to come up with next. One minute he’d be talking about Cold War politics, and the next minute he’d tease us about not knowing anything yet about girls. He had been trained in opera, and sometimes he’d stand at the edge of the water and belt out an aria. The dog would howl in accompaniment, and Karl and I would get embarrassed and walk farther and farther behind him.

  Fredi was the source of the gladiator idea. “What do you guys know about strength training?” he asked us one day. “Why don’t you copy the Roman gladiators? They knew how to train!” Although he was pushing Karl to go to medical school, he was thrilled that his son had started working out. The idea of balancing the body and the mind was like a religion for him. “You have to build the ultimate physical machine but also the ultimate mind,” he would say. “Read Plato! The Greeks started the Olympics, but they also gave us the great philosophers, and you’ve got to take care of both.” He would tell us stories of the Greek gods, and about the beauty of the body and beauty in the ideal. “I know some of this is going in one ear and out the other,” he’d say. “But I’m going to push you guys, and someday the penny will drop, and you will realize how important it is.”

  Right at that moment, though, we were more focused on what we could learn from Kurt Marnul. Kurt was totally charming and hip. He was perfect for us because he was Mr. Austria. He had the body and the girls and held the record in the bench press, and he drove an Alfa Romeo convertible. As I got to know him, I studied his whole routine. His day job was as the foreman of a road construction crew. He started work early in the morning and finished at three. Then he would put in three hours at the gym, training hard. He’d let us visit him so we would get the idea: you work, you make the money, and then you can afford this car; you train and then you win championships. There was no shortcut; you earned it.

  Marnul was into beautiful girls. He knew how to find them anywhere: at restaurants, at the lake, at sports fields. Sometimes he’d invite them to stop by the job site where he’d be in his tank top, bossing the workers, directing equipment around. Then he’d come over and schmooze. The Thalersee was a key part of his routine. A typical guy would simply ask a girl out for a drink after work, but not Kurt. He’d drive her in his Alfa to the lake for a swim. Then they’d have dinner at the restaurant, and he’d get the red wine going. He always had a blanket and another bottle of wine in the car. They’d go back to the lake and pick some romantic spot. He’d put down the blanket and open the wine and sweet-talk the girl. The guy was smooth. Seeing him in action sped up the process in me that the math teacher had begun. I memorized Kurt’s lines, and his moves, including the blanket and wine. We all did. And the girls responded!

  Kurt and the others saw potential in me because in a short period of training, I grew and gained a lot of strength. At the end of the summer, they invited me to come work out in Graz where they had weights. The Athletic Union gym was down under the stands of the public soccer stadium; a big concrete room with overhead lights and the most basic equipment, barbells and dumbbells and chin-up bars and benches. It was full of big men puffing and heaving. The guys from the lake showed me how to do some basic lifts, and for the next three hours, I happily worked in, doing dozens upon dozens of presses and squats and curls.

  A normal beginner’s workout would be three sets of ten reps of each exercise, so your muscles just get a taste. But nobody told me that. The regulars at the stadium gym liked to trick the new guys. They egged me on so that I did ten sets of each exercise. After I finished, I joyfully took a shower—we didn’t have running water at home, so I always looked forward to a shower at the soccer stadium, even though the water was unheated. Then I put on my clothes and walked outside.

  My legs were feeling a little rubbery and sluggish, but I didn’t think much about it. Then I got on my bike and fell off. This was strange, and I noticed now my arms and legs didn’t feel connected to me. I got back on the bike, and I couldn’t control the handlebars, and my thighs were shaking like they were made of porridge. I veered off to the side and fell into a ditch. It was pitiful. I gave up on riding the bike. I ended up having to walk it home, an epic four-mile hike. Still, I couldn’t wait to get back to the gym and try weight training again.

  That summer had a miraculous effect on me. Instead of existing, I started to live. I was catapulted out of the dull routine of Thal—where you get up, you get the milk from next door, come home and do your push-ups and sit-ups while your mother makes the breakfast and your father gets ready for work—the routine where there was really nothing much to look forward to. Now all of a sudden there was joy, there was struggle, there was pain, there was happiness, there were pleasures,
there were women, there was drama. Everything made it feel like “now we are really living! This is really terrific!” Even though I appreciated the example of my father with the discipline and the things that he accomplished professionally, in sports, with the music, the very fact that he was my father took away from its significance for me. All of a sudden, I had a whole new life, and it was mine.

  —

  In the fall of 1962, at the age of fifteen, I began a new chapter in my life. I entered the vocational school in Graz and started my apprenticeship. Although I was still living at home, the gym in many ways replaced my family. The older guys helped the younger ones. They’d come over if you did something wrong or to correct your form. Karl Gerstl became one of my training partners, and we learned the joy of inspiring each other, pumping each other up, competing in a positive way. “I’m going to do ten reps of this weight, I guarantee you,” Karl would say. Then he’d do eleven, just to stick it to me, and declare, “That was really great!” I’d just look at him and say, “Let me go for twelve now.”

  A lot of our ideas for training came from magazines. There were muscle-building and weight-lifting publications in German, but the US ones were by far the best, with our friend Mui providing the translations. The magazines were our bible for training, for nutrition, for different ways to make protein drinks to build muscles, for working with a training partner. The magazines had a way of promoting bodybuilding as a golden dream. Every issue had pictures of champions and details about their training routines. You’d see these guys smiling and flexing and showing off their bodies on Muscle Beach in Venice, California, of course surrounded by stunning girls in sexy bathing suits. We all knew the name of the publisher, Joe Weider, who was sort of the Hugh Hefner of the muscle world: he owned the magazines, had his picture and column in every issue, and included his wife, Betty, a gorgeous model, in almost every beach shot.